Global Health

The Global Digital Health Network, formerly the mHealth Working Group created in 2009 by global health organizations for global health organizations, is a 3000+ person-strong networking forum for members from 108 countries to share information, engage with the broader community, and provide leadership in digital health for global public health. The Network provides leadership in digital health (mHealth, eHealth, and ICTs) and offers a collaborative gathering space for members to share perspectives, resources, and practical guidance related to implementation across a range of technical areas. Our members support global public health strategies, standards and practices through use of innovative technologies in limited resource settings. Our events and communications are a venue to share practical and flexible guidance with each other and the community.

HealthEnabled is a South Africa-based non profit organization that helps national governments in low- and middle-income countries make short- and long-term decisions to integrate life-saving digital health solutions into their health systems. The organisation provides the necessary expertise, experience, and connections to help governments integrate digital solutions into their health systems. While we currently have a specific emphasis on Africa, particularly South Africa, our expertise, network and reach are global. The members of our Expert Network come from 34 countries across the world and speak 35 languages, and our resources and capacity building activities have a global audience. HealthE Africa is a broad networking initiative undertaken in partnership with Knowledge for Health, raising the visibility of digital health needs, experts and projects on the continent.

Search over 11,000 global digital health evidence sources, mHealthEvidence.org was designed to bring together the world’s literature on mHealth to make it easier for program managers, researchers, government leaders, donors, software developers, and other key decision-makers to quickly get up to speed on the current state-of-the-art and evidence-based best practices. It includes peer-reviewed and grey literature from low-, middle- and high-resource settings.

“The World Health Assembly Resolution on Digital Health unanimously approved by WHO Member States in May 2018 demonstrated a collective recognition of the value of digital technologies to contribute to advancing universal health coverage (UHC) and other health aims of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This resolution urged ministries of health “to assess their use of digital technologies for health […] and to prioritize, as appropriate, the development, evaluation, implementation, scale-up and greater use of digital technologies,... Furthermore, it tasked WHO with providing normative guidance in digital health, including through the promotion of evidence based digital health interventions.

The key aim of this guideline is to present recommendations based on a critical evaluation of the evidence on emerging digital health interventions that are contributing to health system improvements, based on an assessment of the benefits, harms, acceptability, feasibility, resource use and equity considerations. For the purposes of this version of the guideline, the recommendations examine the extent to which digital health interventions, primarily available via mobile devices, are able to address health system challenges along the pathway to UHC. By reviewing the evidence of different digital interventions against comparative options, as well as assessing the risks, this guideline aims to equip health policy-makers and other stakeholders with recommendations and implementation considerations for making informed investments into digital health interventions.” (WHO guideline: recommendations on digital interventions for health system strengthening. Geneva: World Health Organization; 2019. Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO.)

Unicef Innovation Fund

The Innovation Fund allows UNICEF to quickly assess, fund and grow open-source solutions that can improve children’s lives. Financial and technological support is available for companies that are using technology in innovative ways to improve the world.

Visit the "NEWS" page to check out the Fund's latest announcement of 13 new investments. The Fund has made 72 investments in 42 countries with an eye to invest in 20 more start-ups in 2019.